You are the Exchange administrator of your company. You configure an Exchange Server 2007 organization on the company’s network. The Exchange organization consists of three Mailbox servers, two Client Access servers, three Hub Transport servers and three Edge Transport servers.

The Edge Transport servers are named Edge1, Edge2 and Edge3. You want to ensure the traffic is load-balanced between Edge1 and Edge2. You want to use Edge3 as a backup. Edge3 will be used when Edge1 and Edge2 are unable to process the users’ requests. You create a Mail Exchanger (MX) resource record for each Edge Transport server. How should you configure priority for each server? (Each correct answer presents part of the solution. Choose three.)

Set the priority value of 10 for Edge1.

Set the priority value of 20 for Edge1.

Set the priority value of 10 for Edge2.

Set the priority value of 20 for Edge2.

Set the priority value of 10 for Edge3.

Set the priority value of 20 for Edge3.

Answer: A. Set the priority value of 10 for Edge1. C. Set the priority value of 10 for Edge2. F. Set the priority value of 20 for Edge3.

Tutorial: You should set the priority value of 10 for Edge1 and Edge2 and set the priority value of 20 for Edge3. When you have multiple Edge Transport servers, you can configure DNS round robin to load-balance the SMTP traffic between Edge Transport servers. DNS round robin is a mechanism that is used by DNS servers to share and distribute loads for network resources. While configuring load balancing for Edge Transport servers, the new MX records should point to Edge Transport servers and should have the same priority. The servers configured with lower preference receive the request first. If there is more than one server that has the same priority level, DNS distributes the requests among them equally to load-balance the traffic. If the servers with lower priority levels are unable to process the request, the request is then forwarded to the server with a higher priority level. This configuration allows you to keep the server with a higher priority level as a backup server.

You should not set the priority value of 20 for Edge1 or Edge2 or set the priority value of 10 for Edge3. If you configure the same priority level for all three servers, the traffic will be load-balanced between all the three servers. If you configure Edge3 with a lower priority level than Edge1 and Edge2, the requests will be served by Edge1 first, and if Edge3 is unavailable, the requests will be forwarded to Edge1 and Edge2. In this scenario, you want to ensure that the traffic is load-balanced between Edge1 and Edge2, and Edge3 will be used when Edge1 and Edge2 are unable to process the users’ requests. To achieve this, you should configure the same priority level for Edge1 and Edge2 and configure Edge3 with a higher priority level than Edge1 and Edge2.